Hi {{first_name}}
Quick question before we get into it: how many tools do you use every week without really thinking about them?
Not the ones on your roadmap. The ones you open quietly at 7 am, before the standups start, to figure out what actually needs to happen today.
That list is usually short, and the tools on it earned their place.
We've been thinking about that list a lot at PMHelp. And it got us wondering: how often do we actually stop to examine the products we rely on? Not just use them but look at them the way we'd look at something we were building ourselves?
So we're starting something new today.
Introducing the PMHelp Product Spotlight: a recurring feature in this newsletter where we pick one product, take it apart, and tell you exactly what's there. What works, what doesn't, what you'd learn from building it, and whether it's worth your time.
Our first issue is focused on a product that evolved twice.
Product Spotlight #001
Todoist — the to-do list that refused to stay a to-do list
In 2007, a Bosnian-born computer science student named Amir Salihefendic was sitting in his dorm room in Aarhus, Denmark, juggling coursework and two part-time programming jobs. He needed a system to manage his life. He looked around, couldn't find a tool he liked, and built one.
He put up a post on his blog. People found it.
Then, in 2008, he left. A social network called Plurk offered him a role, and he took it, stepping away from Doist almost entirely. For four years, the product ran without him. No major updates, no growth push, no marketing. When he came back in 2012, there were still 200,000 users.
That number matters more than it looks. It means Todoist solved a real enough problem that people kept using it through four years of neglect. That's not loyalty. That's product-market fit sitting quietly, waiting to be noticed.
Amir noticed. He came back full-time, built a remote team, and started growing in earnest. Today, Todoist has over 50 million users across 160+ countries, more than 374,000 five-star reviews, and 2 billion tasks completed. Its parent company, Doist, has taken $0 in outside funding since the beginning. No investors. No acquisition targets. Amir has said he has no exit strategy — he's building something he wants to outlast him.
That's the company. Now let's look at the product.
PRODUCT PROFILE
Todoist is a task and project manager. That description undersells it and it also sets the right expectations, depending on what you need.
What it does in reality:
Capture
The fastest way to get something into Todoist is Quick Add, a natural language input bar that parses what you type and builds the task automatically. Type "Submit the report every Friday at 9 am" and Todoist figures out the recurrence and the time without a single dropdown. There's also a newer feature called Ramble, where you just speak out loud, in whatever order your thoughts come, and Todoist converts your words into structured tasks. For anyone who thinks faster than they type, that's a meaningful difference.
Organize
Tasks sit inside Projects. Projects can have Sections. Views shift between List, Kanban board, and Calendar depending on what you're looking at. Labels let you tag tasks across different projects so you can pull them together in a single filter view. Priority levels (P1 through P4) flag what's urgent.
AI
Todoist has been adding AI in layers. Task Assist helps break down goals into tasks. Filter Assist helps build custom filter queries without writing filter syntax manually. Ramble, the voice-to-task feature, is available in limited form on the free plan and unlimited on paid tiers.
Integrations
90+ native integrations covering calendars, email, messaging, time tracking, browsers, and project management tools. Google Calendar, Outlook, Slack, and Jira are among the most used. Beyond the 90, automation platforms like Zapier and Make extend it further, and there's a public API for anything custom
Pricing
Three tiers. Beginner is free: 5 projects, basic reminders, list and board views, 1 week of activity history. Pro unlocks 300 projects, calendar layout, task durations, custom reminders, unlimited activity history, and Task Assist. Business adds the team workspace, up to 500 team projects, 1,000 members, shared templates, role-based permissions, and centralized billing.
A PM lens on the product as it stands today.
What Works:
Language Input: The natural language input is genuinely good. It's one of those features you stop noticing after a week because it just works and that's the best review you can give a productivity tool. You stop thinking about the tool and start thinking about your tasks.
Templates: Templates are practical and cover enough ground: content calendars, hiring pipelines, employee onboarding, and 1-on-1 meeting agendas. They're not decorative. They're genuinely useful starting points.
Room to grow
Efficient Task Management: Todoist is built for tasks. When your projects get complex: dependencies, timelines, cross-functional visibility, status tracking, the tool starts to show its edges. There are no Gantt charts, no built-in time tracking, no workload view across team members. For lightweight coordination, it's fine. For running a full product team, most PMs will find themselves needing something alongside it.
Pricing: The free plan is genuinely limited to 5 projects. For anyone managing more than a couple of areas of life and work, you'll hit that ceiling quickly. The jump to Pro fixes it, but it's a jump worth knowing about before you build your whole system on the free tier.
Your Turn
We want you to explore Todoist this week as a learner, as a builder, or as a PM who can't help but notice things. Then come back and tell us what you see.
What would you build differently? What's working that they should double down on? What's missing that users clearly need? Hit reply and send us your teardown. The best ones get featured in next month's edition.
Also, if you’ve got a product you'd like us to spotlight, you can reply to this email with suggestions.
Resources this week
The foundational read on why established players miss disruption.
A practical walkthrough on how to analyse a product like a PM.
Jobs of the Week
You can find more open roles on our job board.
Before we go
Good products solve problems.
Great products reshape how and when those problems get solved.
For PMs, that’s the real lesson here. The opportunity isn’t always in creating something entirely new; it’s in identifying where friction already exists and collapsing it into a single, seamless experience.
That’s where the real product opportunities live.
Till we meet again.
With 💜 from your Buddy at PMHelp